3 Politicians Walk Into a Bar…

And I thought the most embarrassing thing in politics between Canadian Thanksgiving and American Thanksgiving would have been Sarah Palin’s interview in front of the turkey getting slaughtered. But surprise, surprise, it might be the Amy Winehouse-ian train wreck that is currently underway in Ottawa right now.

Barely six weeks after an election that voters yawned over, that put nails in the political coffin of at least two party leaders (presumably), and didn’t change a single thing, politics is back. Only this time it is a sequel directed by Michael Bay and full of awesome political explosions.

The main question is: Did Stephen Harper lay a trap so big, so savvy, so long term, and so many chess moves ahead that he might actually bring himself down as well? Or did the Conservative Bobby Fisher make one too many moves that has caused The Liberals, NDP, and the Bloc to somehow think it is a good idea to bring the government down, leaving us with the amusing trifecta of Stephane Dion as Prime Minister, Jack Layton as Finance Minister, and Gilles Duceppe as Minister of Foreign Affairs?

That last sentence had me waking up in a cold sweat that felt like a cross between Bobby Ewing after that dream season on Dallas and Han Solo after he was frozen in carbonite.

Let’s be clear. Harper started this by proposing to take away some federal (read: taxpayer) money, $28 million to be exact, for the down on their luck political parties. This set the wheels in motion for a possible vote of no confidence. Now the so called ‘Coalition of the Credulous‘ claim it is because the government didn’t push through a fiscal stimulus goody bag package that won’t do much to stimulate much of anything. You know, because every other nation has thrown millions into stimulus packages, we need one too.

“I’m not a big fan of short-term stimulus packages,” said Don Drummond, chief economist at TD Bank. “They don’t really generate very much short-term stimulus and they very quickly become long-term structural problems.”

But wait, there’s more. The Tories record NDP conference calls, and the NDP has a secret deal with the Bloc long before last week’s economic update. And potential Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff apparently thought the whole thing was a mess, until he brokered his own deal to be Prime Minister upon any successful coup.

And maybe this was his game plan all along. Harper and Co. have already pulled the plug on the plan and have started floating spending ideas willy-nilly, while leaving the three opposition leaders out in the wilderness still pushing to bring down the government. Is it a total turkey shoot? Is it an Ashton Kutcher-led punking that has the separatists sleeping with the establishment Grits and the socialists? Clearly it seems to be working, as it has lured some political vampires back from the dead.

“They’ve pulled (former Liberal prime minister Jean) Chrétien and (former NDP leader Ed) Broadbent out of the political crypt to try and give (Liberal leader Stephane) Dion the chair he couldn’t make during the election,” says Thornhill MP Peter Kent.

The irony is that under the minority environment scenario, all of this is how the game is played. It proves that the system actually works. The Government drops a bomb, the opposition calls for war, the government changes its mind, and then everything goes back to normal. At least that is how it is supposed to go. And Harper has either blinked or hoodwinked the opposition. It’s too soon to tell which.

The United States got Obama and change and we get the almost hilarious “Coalition For Canada”. It must be the start of a joke. I’m sure of it.

Dion, Layton, and Duceppe walk into a bar…